As a psychiatrist, Aboujaoude said he sees many patients with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and the behavioral shifts brought about by Internet use. In 2006, he and other Stanford researchers published the results of a major study on problematic Internet habits that included more than 2,500 adults.

But Aboujaoude said that the dangers of the e-personality don't just apply to those with the most extreme Internet habits. Potentially, he said, everyone who connects to the Web is changed.

"Society at large is becoming a more angry, uncivil place," he said, pointing to the violent rhetoric that preceded the recent tragedy in Tucson and the vitriol surrounding the health care law debates last summer. "We should ask ourselves if one reason we've become so uncivil is because of what we do online and how we act on our blogs and in our chat rooms."

His arguments echo those of Nicholas Carr, who recently published "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains." Aboujaoude says the fast-moving, information-overloaded Internet conditions people to become impulse-driven, impatient and unfocused.

h-frequency trading networks, which complete stock market transactions in microseconds, are vulnerable to manipulation by hackers who can inject tiny amounts of latency into them. By doing so, they can subtly change the course of trading and pocket profits of millions of dollars in just a few seconds, says Rony Kay, a former IBM research fellow and founder of cPacket Networks, a Silicon Valley firm that develops chips and technologies for network monitoring and traffic analysis.

Kay, an Israeli-born computer scientist and one-time Intel engineering manager, says the root of the problem is the increasing speed of networks; as they get faster and faster, our ability to actually understand events taking place within them isn’t keeping up. Network monitoring technology can detect perturbations in network traffic happening in milliseconds, but when changes occur in microseconds, they’re not visible, he says.

During times of war, governments are notorious for capitalizing on their ability to suppress dissent and manipulate the masses. In the wake of 9/11 hysteria, the Bush administration enacted several controversial pieces of legislation that severely curtailed Americans’ freedoms under the pretext of “security” and “protection”. With the help of a consistently compliant and unquestioning media, his administration also instituted a legal framework to circumvent citizens’ civil liberties and target their free speech. Bush’s cabinet adopted Orwellian rhetoric and Nazi style propaganda to litigate sweeping measures that further eradicated liberty: The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act’s (USA Patriot Act) warrantless domestic wiretapping, and the Homegrown Terrorism Act & Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act’s criminalization of thought and peaceful activism.

Nine years after 9/11 and two years into Obama’s reign, the vague threat of terrorism still hangs in perpetual balance as the justifying cliché for the administration’s continuation of such Bush-era policies. Obama has followed the same Bush trends of illegal detention, rendition, wiretapping, spying, state secrets, demonization, persecution and fear mongering against the population. Obama has aggressively cracked down on whistleblowers exposing military corruption as well as given a green light to assassinate US citizens abroad without due process of law. One of the most disturbing trends in the ever-expanding police state are the new Z Backscatter vans, vehicles that are giant X ray machines, designed to discreetly scan through people’s houses and cars without their knowledge – a surveillance tool that blatantly violates fourth amendment rights.

Like Orwell’s portrayal, the US government’s expanding power structure relies on nationalist propaganda to manufacture and cultivate the fear of an enemy. Although the War on Terrorism has consumed the political climate for almost a decade, the chances of actually dying in a terrorist attack in the United States are statistically insignificant. This little mentioned fact undermines the current administration’s justification for their extension of state powers and secrecy in order to protect the country’s “national security”.

It’s critically important to create dialogue about America’s covert slide to fascism. Absolute power corrupts absolutely– our politicians and their corporate puppeteers will continue their greedy power grabs unabated unless our society starts speaking out against the dehumanization and the unconstitutionality of the emerging police state.

Arteries with highly elastic protein overcome barrier for living vascular grafts
February 1, 2011 by Editor

University of Pittsburgh researchers have grown arteries that exhibit the elasticity of natural blood vessels at the highest levels reported, a development that could overcome a major barrier to creating living-tissue replacements for damaged arteries.

The team used smooth muscle cells from adult baboons to produce the first arteries grown outside the body that contain a substantial amount of the pliant protein elastin, which allows vessels to expand and retract in response to blood flow. Lead researcher Yadong Wang, a professor of bioengineering in Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering, his postdoctoral researcher Kee-Won Lee, and Donna Stolz, a professor of cell biology and physiology in Pitt’s School of Medicine, cultured the baboon cells in a nutrient-rich solution to bear arteries with approximately 20 percent as much elastin as an inborn artery.

The Pitt process is notable for its simplicity, Wang said. Elastin—unlike its tougher counterpart collagen that gives vessels their strength and shape—has been notoriously difficult to reproduce. The only successful methods have involved altering cell genes with a virus; rolling cell sheets into tubes; or culturing elastin with large amounts of transforming growth factor, Wang said. And still these previous projects did not report a comparison of elastin content with natural vessels.

During times of war, governments are notorious for capitalizing on their ability to suppress dissent and manipulate the masses. In the wake of 9/11 hysteria, the Bush administration enacted several controversial pieces of legislation that severely curtailed Americans’ freedoms under the pretext of “security” and “protection”. With the help of a consistently compliant and unquestioning media, his administration also instituted a legal framework to circumvent citizens’ civil liberties and target their free speech. Bush’s cabinet adopted Orwellian rhetoric and Nazi style propaganda to litigate sweeping measures that further eradicated liberty: The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act’s (USA Patriot Act) warrantless domestic wiretapping, and the Homegrown Terrorism Act & Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act’s criminalization of thought and peaceful activism.

Nine years after 9/11 and two years into Obama’s reign, the vague threat of terrorism still hangs in perpetual balance as the justifying cliché for the administration’s continuation of such Bush-era policies. Obama has followed the same Bush trends of illegal detention, rendition, wiretapping, spying, state secrets, demonization, persecution and fear mongering against the population. Obama has aggressively cracked down on whistleblowers exposing military corruption as well as given a green light to assassinate US citizens abroad without due process of law. One of the most disturbing trends in the ever-expanding police state are the new Z Backscatter vans, vehicles that are giant X ray machines, designed to discreetly scan through people’s houses and cars without their knowledge – a surveillance tool that blatantly violates fourth amendment rights.

Like Orwell’s portrayal, the US government’s expanding power structure relies on nationalist propaganda to manufacture and cultivate the fear of an enemy. Although the War on Terrorism has consumed the political climate for almost a decade, the chances of actually dying in a terrorist attack in the United States are statistically insignificant. This little mentioned fact undermines the current administration’s justification for their extension of state powers and secrecy in order to protect the country’s “national security”.

It’s critically important to create dialogue about America’s covert slide to fascism. Absolute power corrupts absolutely– our politicians and their corporate puppeteers will continue their greedy power grabs unabated unless our society starts speaking out against the dehumanization and the unconstitutionality of the emerging police state.

I think all this **** is done out of simple greed. At the end of the day, its all about accumulating as much power and wealth as possible and spouting whatever rhetoric is necessary to justify your acts (and even better, dupe the masses into going along with it).

I think all this **** is done out of simple greed. At the end of the day, its all about accumulating as much power and wealth as possible and spouting whatever rhetoric is necessary to justify your acts (and even better, dupe the masses into going along with it).

New research published in the current issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine demonstrates the capability of tissue-engineered vascular grafts that are immediately available at the time of surgery and are less likely to become infected or obstructed. A surgeon could pull a new human vein off the shelf for use in life-saving vascular surgeries.

The bioengineering method of producing veins shows promise in large- and small-diameter applications, such as for coronary artery bypass surgery and for vascular access in hemodialysis.

Humacyte, a Morrisville biotechnology company, worked with university researchers to develop the veins.

“This new type of bioengineered vein allows them to be easily stored in hospitals so they are readily available to surgeons at the time of need,” said Dr. Alan P. Kypson, a cardiothoracic surgeon, associate professor at the Brody School of Medicine at ECU and an author of the paper. “Currently, grafting using the patient’s own veins remains the gold standard. But, harvesting a vein from the patient’s leg can lead to complications, and for patients who don’t have suitable veins, the bioengineered veins could serve as an important new way to provide a coronary bypass.”

The American Heart Association Update on Heart Disease Statistics reports that in 2007, in the United States, surgeons performed more than 400,000 coronary bypass procedures. Patients requiring bypass surgery may not have suitable veins or arteries available and are not candidates for synthetic grafts because of the size needed for grafting.

Lauren A.E. Schuker reports for the Wall Street Journal on a new text messaging service that claims to keep your secrets safe:

TigerText Inc., which can send texts that vanish from both the sender and receiver’s phone after a select period of time so they can’t be copied or forwarded, has developed a niche following among celebrities trying to keep their lives private. About half a million people have downloaded the service, which was started in February 2010 by four Los Angeles businessmen.